Penelope Bridges
“Let me sing for my beloved my love-song concerning his vineyard.”
After hearing some disturbing words from Jesus in the Gospel, it might feel like a relief to return for a moment to Isaiah’s beautiful vineyard poem. The Hebrew prophets often used metaphors and parables to duck under the mental defences of their listeners. Jeremiah spoke of the potter and the clay. Hosea bewailed an unfaithful spouse. Amos described a bowl of overripe summer fruit.
Every time, the prophet lures his listeners into an imaginary landscape before making explicit his indictment of God’s people. And Isaiah is no exception. The beloved one, who turns out to be God, has worked the vineyard of the chosen people for generations, has done all the work necessary for it to yield abundant fruit; and its stubborn refusal to meet expectation is a bitter disappointment, a heartbreaker for the beloved.
You see, in Biblical terms, a vineyard is more than a garden, more than a pleasant piece of terrain. A vineyard is a powerful symbol, of peace, prosperity, abundance, and celebration.
Peace because it takes years of cultivation for the vineyard to produce, and in times of war, land is trampled and vines are destroyed. So a productive vineyard comes only after an extended time of peace.
Prosperity, because a vineyard is a commercial undertaking that provides employment for a community and yields profit for the owner.
Abundance because the harvested grapes are filled with sweet nectar that nourishes and sustains a people.
And celebration through the enjoyment of the wine that can be produced from those grapes. You’ll recall that in John’s Gospel the first miracle that Jesus did was to produce an abundance of wine.
So cultivating a vineyard is a serious investment with multiple expectations. When it fails, after receiving the best possible care and cultivation, it isn’t just a disappointment but a betrayal, a negation of all the good things in life. No wonder the prophet reacts in grief-stricken anger, threatening to tear it apart and render the land barren. And at the end of the story: “The vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel, and the people of Judah are his pleasant planting.”
Isaiah drops the hammer: the vineyard is God’s own people, who have turned away – once again – from their God.
Obviously Isaiah was speaking to his own contemporary context, but the power and beauty of Scripture is that we can read these ancient texts and find relevance to our own time. Whether it’s national or international politics, or a more personal situation, Isaiah potentially speaks to us. We can all probably think of a relationship on which time, devotion, and resources have been lavished, only to see a bitterly disappointing outcome.
Perhaps the ruined vineyard represents a family that implodes when a beloved matriarch or patriarch dies and the heirs squabble and compete. Perhaps it’s a child whom a parent has nurtured and loved only to have that child harm them – or conversely the parent rejects the child who has adored and trusted them. The parable could apply to humanity’s relationship with the earth itself, the accumulation over millennia , of knowledge that would enable us to protect and conserve nature, except that we have turned to destructive and rapacious practices, that are destroying our environment. The love-song of the vineyard can reach us in many contexts, when we reflect on its deeper meaning.
The prophets draw a direct line between an unjust and faithless society and the suffering of the people. They condemn the concentration of wealth that inevitably means that the poor get poorer, and the greed of the powerful that leads to the suffering of the innocent. It’s not that God inflicts the suffering, but that suffering is an inevitable consequence of injustice and unrighteousness.
The saddest part of this poem is that God ultimately gives up on the vineyard. It reminds me of Isaiah’s contemporary, the prophet Amos, who threatened his people with a famine of the word of God. To be cut off from God is a terrible fate. What if God were to give up on us? The one thing we as people of faith depend on, the thing we stake our lives on even in the worst circumstances, is that God will never give up on us. That conviction keeps hope alive; and the letter to the Hebrews reminds us of the heroes of the faith who never lost hope, that great cloud of witnesses whose stories support us and encourage us to maintain hope in our own day.
So let’s turn to the Gospel and the hard teaching that Jesus has for us today. He speaks of the inevitability of conflict when we turn our lives over to him. He warns of division within families and communities. This isn’t what we want to hear from him, but we cannot ignore the evidence: that Jesus came among us, not to be meek and mild, but to cause trouble: to change the world, to turn societies upside down, to make visible what has been concealed. He calls the people to account because they refuse to recognize God’s work when they see it. They don’t embrace Jesus as the bringer of radical change to the world, because change is frightening and uncomfortable.
The scholar Ed Friedman wrote about how difficult it is to change a system, whether that is a family, a congregation, or a nation: if one element, one member makes a determined effort to change, the whole system will have to change too, to accommodate that member, and systems resist being changed. At every level there is a desire to keep things the way they are, a preference to live with the familiar pain of the present, rather than risk the unknowable pain of change.
When we commit to working for the Kingdom, we are going to suffer for that faith as the prophets and heroes suffered, because we are trying to bring about justice in an unjust world, to bring down the mighty and raise up the lowly; and the mighty won’t go down without a fight. That resistance to change is what led to Jesus being crucified, and it continues to stand in the way of God’s vineyard coming to fruition.
In times of conflict and suffering, when we see the world going to hell in a handbasket, we come face to face with God’s call to be faithful, to do what is right, to bring about the change that God wants to see in the world. This is a turbulent time in our history; all the more reason for those who are committed to God’s mission to stand up and be counted. For those of us who read Scripture, the lesson of Jesus and the prophets is clear: we can’t say we weren’t warned.
Amen.
